Complaints and Appeals procedures

Higher education institutions have the possibility to complain or appeal about FINEEC's evaluaton activities for higher education institutions in accordance with the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance
in the European Higher Education Area (ESG 2015). 

Complaint procedure

Higher education institutions have the possibility of making a complaint about FINEEC's higher education evaluation activities. The procedure follows the principles of the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG). Higher education institutions can use the complaint procedure to express their dissatisfaction with the way the evaluation process was carried out or with the actions of the persons who carried out the evaluation, i.i. to give feedback on the evaluation activities. FINEEC has a separate appeals procedure for accreditations.

Principles of FINEEC's complaints procedure for evaluations of higher education institutions:

• The complaint must concern FINEEC's higher education evaluation process or the actions of the persons who conducted the evaluation.
• The complaint is made by a higher education institution. FINEEC does not process anonymous complaints.
• The complaint must be made within six months of the publication of the evaluation, audit, or accreditation it concerns.
• We will only process complaints that are within the scope of FINEEC's official duties.

We make every effort to process any complaints we receive within one month of the complaint having been sent to FINEEC. Once we have processed the complaint, we will get in touch with the contact person of the institution that made it. A complaint is initially processed by FINEEC’s Director or the Head of the Higher Education and Liberal Adult Education Unit, who decides if the response to the complaint should be drawn up by FINEEC's officials or if it should be submitted to the Higher Education Evaluation Committee or the Committee for Engineering Education. A written response is issued to a written complaint. The scope of the response depends on the scope of the issue to be considered. Our aim is to resolve disagreements in a constructive and improvement-oriented manner.

The higher education institution can make a complaint using the form. 

Appeals procedure

The Finnish Education Evaluation Centre (FINEEC) has issued an appeal’s procedure for the engineering degree programme accreditations that can be used by higher education institutions to request a review of the outcome of an engineering programme accreditation conducted by FINEEC. The procedure follows the jointly agreed European quality assurance principles for evaluation agencies.

The objective of the procedure is to ensure equal treatment of higher education institutions as well as degree programmes and to guarantee that the FINEEC Committee for Engineering Education makes fair decisions about accreditation outcomes. The procedure will be applied to accreditation performed in accordance with the accreditation manual Standards and Procedures for Engineering Programme Accreditation - the Updated Version 2024 (FINEEC 26:2024).

The request may be based on the grounds that the accreditation process has not been performed in compliance with the accreditation manual, and that the accreditation process, as performed, brings into question the fair and equal treatment of higher education institutions and the degree programmes. The decisions concerning accreditation outcomes, issued by the FINEEC Committee for Engineering Evaluation shall be considered expert opinions. They are not administrative decisions, and appeals pursuant to the Administrative Judicial Procedure Act cannot be filed to challenge them.

The procedure is valid until 30.6.2027.

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